Threads
by KhalaniK
Summary: Zechs uncovers a missing piece of the past in the most unexpected way. A coda to Limbo.


Title: Threads

Pairing: Treize/Zechs via flashback

Warnings: Instances of swearing, light male/male sensuality

Spoilers: Series, EW

Rating: PG-13/Teen, for a couple swears

Time: December AC 202

I'm loath to say that this is a sequel to Limbo, but I guess that's pretty much what it is. This is probably the last of my fics for the near future, after a solid year straight of writing up every second of my free time. Because of this, I wanted to close out with my favorite pairing – and I've always wanted to write a Christmas one-shot.

This story is definitely dependent on back story elements from Limbo, and to a lesser extent from Growing Up (both archived here). However, any reader who dislikes reading male/female pairings could certainly get a great deal out of this story without reading Growing Up.

This story is dedicated to LoveyouHateyou, located in my favorite authors section. Without him, without his beautiful writing and wonderful encouragement, I never would have written anything in this fandom. Thank you for always being there for me, for your fantastic, thoughtful feedback and patient listening to all my babbles.

I hope you enjoy. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Note: Flashback separated from reality by 'xxxx' marks.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Une has a very, very small piece of something green between her top right canine and what I believe is called the lateral incisor. I've been staring at it, oblivious to the perception I'm creating, because I'm still looking approximately at her face as she's briefing me on findings from the Senate's latest budgetary deliberations. The verdict, the single pertinent point I'm gathering after a solid fifty-five minutes seated in front of her desk like a delinquent, is that I'm getting more money. She's going through her briefing like one believes they should walk through a Zen garden, slowly, and with no shortage of intentional but ultimately pointless pauses.

Like this one, except that I gather from the way her well-formed fingernail is clawing at the edge her briefing packet that I'm expected to say something in return. Fortunately, my mind has been programmed from adolescence to keep at least a bare set of notes that can survive virtually any degree of eye-drooping tedium.

"I would commence prototype production of the EM projectile."

My junior engineers have already begun calling it DITA, for 'Dead in the Air,' a lady of once unattainable allure with the stopping force of ten titanium blast doors. They've been waiting impatiently for a green light, approaching me in their clumsy and abashedly intimidated way to feel out whether or not their sci-fi fantasies would be better lived elsewhere, as if there were any other game of this caliber in the entire ESUN. It's the latest in an optimistic line anti-aircraft/MS technologies that my department has developed over the past five years.

"Do it," she says and, like that, her tongue beats a straight path to her leftover lunch, sweeping it away with a single deft stroke, as if she'd known it was there all along. "That should make your boys happy."

'My boys' are, in at least three-quarters of cases, older than me. Still, they qualify as eccentric, young Ph.D-types who remind me not a little of Soren with only a modest fraction of the social acumen. Most days when I come in to work, when I hear them tittering excitedly about minutia or whooping with delight over their newest creative manipulation of physical laws, I wish I had their jobs. I wish I didn't have to climb the stairs to my crow's nest of an office overlooking the Special Projects lab, where I frown and grumble over money and deadlines and performance reviews.

Before I officially agreed to come back, I asked Une why she thought I would make a decent manager. Her face leveled with debatable seriousness and she said, "I think you managed the White Fang fairly well." After disbelieving seconds, my brain kicked up a flurry of dust-covered recollections of what I actually did back then, besides obsess over grudges. And I supposed, reluctantly, but with a lurking sense of awe, that I accomplished quite a bit.

"I expected this sooner," I say. Considering the climate and the most recent threat to the tenuous balance the Preventers maintain between keeping the peace and the establishment of a police state, I figured the funds would have be allocated in an emergency session, back when the topic was torch-hot. The threat is now three months cold, a task managed only barely, a mere open hangar door away from revealing what hypocrites we are and how real the danger still is. I keep trying to remind myself that the ESUN bureaucracy is more efficient than the UESA bureaucracy, but it's occasionally a challenge to convince myself of something that's patently untrue.

"Really? I thought you were smarter than that," she chides.

She lays her packet on the far corner of her massive and crowded desk. Folding her hands, she smiles. Manager to manager, these are the struggles we face. The look makes me remember why I never wanted a position like this, why I never wanted to get any closer to a desk job than those five miserable months I spent as a company commander when I was seventeen. She said it had to be me, that there was nobody else who could head Special Projects, because nobody who knew suits like I did had the gravitas, experience, and academic background to manage this kind of research with these kinds of employees. I'm still not certain what she meant by that last part, and I'm not convinced that it wasn't entirely made up. And as for my academic background, I haven't properly engineered anything since I was nineteen, which, I suppose, is why I'm the manager.

We stare at each other in a mild, non-confrontational way. I want to go, because I know what's next. I know what's about to come out of her mouth when she breaks eye contact, when her gaze shifts to neither me nor work. I know this is the juncture where it's about to get personal. I uncross my ankle from my knee and begin plotting reasonable excuses to get back to the lab. It's not at all difficult to choose from the litany that present themselves, but she starts in before I can beat her to it.

"You are going to the Christmas party," Une tells me, though she somehow fashions it to sound like a question.

I sigh through my nose, a long one that I hope reminds her that my agreement to come back to work for the Preventers was made with conditions, contracted and unarticulated. The latter includes the avoidance of certain topics, people, and events that I keep greedily under the umbrella of my personal business. I'm inarguably entitled to it, and I'm in no way obligated to reminisce or speculate, especially with Une, who is not someone I even consider a friend despite compelling commonalities.

It's not personal. Not really. Because we do go back, and we have had many civil and admittedly interesting conversations on various occasions in the past. If I hadn't come back to Brussels, perhaps we could have been friends. However, my current attitude towards her is primarily because she is my boss, and I have no interest this time around in fraternizing with my superiors or my subordinates, which conveniently leaves a small handful of equal peers that I have properly acquainted myself with. Professionally. Une, however, is not content to keep meetings like these professional, even with my squirming reticence that emerges every time things inevitably tumble into the ditch of impropriety.

"I would prefer not to," I respond frankly, "but I'm guessing I don't have a choice."

"You're getting an award."

My laugh is a quick exhalation. It's a conniving scheme, pairing the holiday party with the semi-annual awards ceremony, the one that's mandatory to attend, the one that, as a manager, I'm doubly expected to not weasel out of because one of my people is always being rewarded for being an immutable geek-genius or saving the sea turtles or some other such winsome act of good citizenship. Their professional successes are their own victories, completely independent of my hands-off brand of management that only truly reigns them in when they're in a rut or brainlessly obliterating the budget.

"For what?" I ask, not even straining for reasons because I know I won't find any good ones. She doesn't know me very well if she thinks foisting me up on a podium with a plaque makes things 'good' between us or makes me grateful for this position. She must realize it has quite the opposite effect, because I think I've been plainly consistent in demonstrating throughout the years my aversion to ceremony and decorum.

"Special Projects has done more in the last six months than it did the entire time Keough was in charge. The only change in staff was you."

"You don't suppose that had something to do with the half-dozen mobile suits that spontaneously appeared and threatened to level Copenhagen?"

Her smile is a cool little thing that I know she practices in front of a mirror. "Let me tell you this about Special Projects, Zechs: they are only as brilliant as the prism that focuses them."

I don't bother arguing back that I'm not especially brilliant, that my position actually requires very little of me. My belief in distance, my trust in my senior engineer, my distaste of micromanagement, and my quiet, undying passion for the field have made the slot a good fit. That I should be rewarded for doing something that interests and doesn't inflict suffering upon me seems absurd at best.

"Mari doesn't want to come to the party."

I am running out of polite ways to tell her that Mariemaia Khushrenada is number two on my extensive list of shit that I never, ever want to discuss with her or anyone else. I am close to framing it exactly like that, for it may be the only way that she won't be able to continue to ignore the signs I've been giving to the effect – the childishly unrestrained eye-rolling, the deliberately vacant staring at inanimate objects, the impatiently shaking leg.

I have never seen the girl in person. I have worked conscientiously throughout my entire adult life to avoid her, sometimes exerting superhuman efforts to maintain this record. I have nothing to say to her. I have no interest in the course of her life. But Une willfully pretends away my disinterest, like she pretends away her lack of social connections and the concept of taking vacation. It struck me the last time this happened that _I am_ her social connection, one of them, maybe even the only one, which is woefully pathetic.

"She says Christmas in New York is too beautiful to miss."

Une is still baffled by the fact that Mari – who is called Mari and definitely not Mariemaia by her own dictate – opted to attend school in America instead of Europe. It short-circuits Une's Old World aristocratic hardwiring that anyone should want to do more than take a shopping holiday 'over there,' as she refers to it. I once divined an explanation for it, my first mistake, and I just happened to make enough sense that this kind of unprofessional conversational deviation has become the rule rather than the exception whenever we have a meeting. The reason, simple enough, little intellect required, is that Mari's not from Europe. She's from a mega-city in space, and barring Une's permission to allow her to go back to her colony, she finds Manhattan to be a close enough analogue.

She doesn't love me.

That was how it started. One meeting, two months ago. It's a sub-topic of a taboo subject that I didn't want to touch with a thee-meter cotton swab, except for the minor fact that Une's face went a shade of sickly melancholy so jarring that not even I could feign unconcern. I think I'm getting soft, because things like that get to me now. Of course, I hesitantly accept that I might have always been soft, a large part of my problem, but with no rage lingering to be compounded by my secret vulnerability, soft is now just soft.

I scrambled through my embarrassingly tiny collection of comforting words trying to find the one that fit her expression.

All I want is for her to love me like a daughter loves her mother.

You're not her mother, and you won't ever be. It's a destructive expectation to have.

I suppose it wasn't the most tactful or kind or comforting reply, but like an addict after a jolt, she kept bringing the subject up to my reluctant analysis.

She doesn't talk to me.

She's thirteen.

She never talked to me. Not really. She's always been very private.

She's had an uncommon life. I'm sure she appreciates the fact that you're there for her, even if she doesn't view you as a mother.

I want her to go to school here. I want to cook dinner for her. She cooks her own dinner and rides the subway at all hours of the night. You should see how she dresses.

Again, she's thirteen and lives in New York City. And as for your fantasies of cooking dinner for her, when, exactly, would you do that? When you come home at 2130? Between Senatorial hearings and training exercises? You don't even cook yourself dinner.

Paoula knows more about her than I do.

Paoula's her bodyguard. I think that's a given.

She's the only connection I have to him.

Well. I'm much stricter with my limitations when it comes to the number one item on my list of shit that I never, ever want to talk about with her or anyone else. That shut me down, as she would have predicted had she not started assuming that we've grown chummy enough to talk about that.

And this week, Mari wants to stay in New York with her friends instead of coming to Brussels to hang out with a bunch of paranoid, high-strung government workers that she doesn't even know.

"Then let her stay. Go visit her. I've heard the city is nice."

This answer displeases Une, and she dismisses me two minutes later. There's a strange pang in my stomach from her reaction to my advice. I was getting used to being spot-on or, at least, perceived as having a valid point. I shake my head. I can't believe I actually care what she thinks about what I think about her relationship with her not-daughter-who-doesn't-love-her. I'm done talking about it. Tighten up your shot group, Merquise.

But who could blame her for not draping affection over Une? Une's no ray of maternal sunshine. Behind her barracuda administrator front, she's awkward at best, a typical child of nobles - and not just any nobles, but _German_ nobles, if I may be prejudicial based on countless interactions with the types. Her birth alone practically guaranteed her to be handicapped in the loving tenderness department. Despite this disadvantage, I'm sure she'd love to play house with Treize's daughter, because I'm sure it plays into some fantasy she's kept quiet from me since she first landed her four eyes on him at the virginal age of fourteen.

Not everybody flees the building, the city, the entire country, when Mariemaia blows into town. A few of my colleagues have been around, witnessed covertly or overtly the interactions between Une and her ward. When Une gets the chance, apparently she lays it on thickly about Treize. And I'm sure the drivel that Mariemaia probably hears is the gold-encrusted info-tainment, docu-drama version of him, the enduring lie that is his legacy.

It's not a total lie, though, because almost everything the media says is true, but there's a level that the press fails to capture, a dimension whose absence makes a falsehood of his entire public image. The way he spoke when he wasn't 'on,' the pathos, the disappointment and ruthless self-correction, his laugh, the boring things, the way he smelled. Us.

I know with utmost certainty that Une's never told her about that one.

But I don't care what Mariemaia knows. Let her stay in New York as the child prodigy in a city thrumming with cultural and intellectual excitement, a place where nobody cares what she did when she was seven, because, to them, she's just another bright stroke of personality in the collective. Good for her. And I just missed the train back to the lab. Fantastic.

Soren and I didn't work. It was far from a catastrophic failure, because we only went on four dates before determining quite intuitively that we didn't work that way. What happened to that overwhelming coffee house magnetism? My horny fantasies of wanting him? I have no idea. Our dates were exactly like our not-dates except for the expectation that something was going to happen at the end of the night.

Which it did.

When it was over, the first and only time, Soren laughed ruefully, hands covering his face, and he said 'I can't believe I don't click with the prince of Sanc.' Like it's a given, which it obviously is not. I can't even click with people on a basic social level, let alone an intimate one. It was a little funny, mostly because it was mutual, completely unpredicted and entirely nonsensical. But that's chemistry, isn't it? That made it oddly easy to deal with, egos saved by something intangible, and the end result was the most unambiguous and emotionally unencumbered friendship that I've ever had in my life.

I am the only one on the train when it finally comes by five minutes later. It's a underground subway that runs deep beneath Brussels, connecting various satellites of the Preventer main campus. Connecting top secret things, more lies, to the photo-worthy, towering imposition of HQ (but please, no photos without expressed written permission). Hangars for Tallgeese III, dozens of Tauruses and modified, pilot-friendly Virgos. All but seven of the Serpents that stormed the capitol six years ago – a decently wicked machine, in my professional opinion. Tethered to the surface by subterranean lifts, they're all deployment-ready in forty-five minutes, with the exception of the Tallgeese and five other rapid-launch units that can be on the ground in less than twenty.

Some would call this cynicism. I've learned to call it prevention, but only because that's the pill I signed an agreement to push. The young ones need to know that there's hope.

As I card in, code in, retinal scan in, I think about Une's order to attend the Christmas party. Here's where I must spare a laugh for myself, because doesn't that sound like the kind of order I'd get? Zechs Merquise MUST attend the Christmas party under penalty of ostracism and hours of obligatory, impromptu family therapy with Director Une. Oh, wait. That's already my life.

My senior engineer materializes from behind the men's room door and effectively blocks the way to my office with a Peter Pan-esque wide-legged stance and a hard-earned challenge in his eye.

"You've got your money," I tell him as he starts to say whatever he's been building the courage to say to me. "Tell Predragović that I want to look over her plans again tomorrow at 1500."

"Okay," he replies, his unnatural sharp edge deflated to his typically thoughtful and passive demeanor. I slide past him easily enough and am pleased with the simplicity of the exchange until I hear him call out behind me:

"Oh, but that's the set-up time for the Christmas party!"

I stop. "Of course it is," I mutter.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

I very briefly blamed my sister for forcing me back to the Preventers, but the truth was that I was growing tearfully tired of working for the Ministry of Culture. Soren's project was a wild success and was shortly after inception fully and permanently funded by the government. As such, it stopped being Soren and my improvised operation when two former professors joined us and rudely upset the amiable and oftentimes entertaining environment that we'd created over the span of a year. No longer could we pull random manuscripts from the shelves and dramatically recite morality plays when the monotony of database development became unbearable. I mourned for that, sourly, as those two pushed up their sagging eyeglasses and dispassionately debated the presence of nihilistic themes in the country's most famous children's book while Soren threw me wide-eyed looks of disbelief from across the room.

I loosened up in Sanc. Got comfortable. Found something that was enchantingly free of ethical tripwire. But when things got serious, when the office cramped up with humorless scholars, I regressed remarkably quickly. I don't think my time there was about the literature. I think it was about latching onto the most rewarding human connection I had, and when somebodies butted their wrinkly, drooping necks in the way, I lost my drive to even do that. Immature, selfish, bratty. Yes, yes. I realize that. This should not be surprising to anybody.

And then Relena called. She often does, but this time it was to perform the unconventional task of doing Une's bidding. 'Do you miss it?' she asked. 'What?' 'The Preventers.' 'No.' 'Don't lie.' Since when did she know if I was lying? 'Don't you miss flying?' That I did. 'Don't you miss mobile suits?' I snorted then, at the irony of her using the things she loathed the most in the universe to seduce me back to Brussels. Did she know that my heart started beating faster at the mere intimation of getting back in the cockpit?

'Don't you miss the people you used to work with?'

Uh, no. She flopped on that one, like shoving a putridly rank, migraine-inducing gardenia under my nose. I figuratively stepped back then, paused, and plainly admired her craft, the gift she has that's considered precious in some circles, which is the ability to convince me to do almost anything just by asking nicely. Her timing was spot-on, because I was already a week from letting myself be replaced by a doctoral student, to Soren's vehemently expressed distress. A decent reason was all I needed.

And suddenly, conveniently, I was legitimately needed elsewhere, for knowing something dangerous, for having thrown myself into the wolf den at an innocent age and miraculously surviving it, for being able to command respect, if only because I'm still sort of scary and definitely still the best pilot in the surviving force, no matter what Yuy's official records say.

'But I need you, too' was Soren's injured reply. 'Those professors are miserable hacks, and that new girl smells like bleach. She literally stings my nose.'

It really was hard to leave. Leaving Soren, one of the only people on this planet I'm outrightly fond of, was hard.

That cat's waiting at my door mat, the orange one that trolls the area for handouts.

"Hey, cat."

It rushes in when I open my door, bee-lining it for the bowl of kibble I leave in my kitchen. It'll come in, gorge itself, not let me pet it, roll around on the floor to shed fist-fulls of hair on the carpet, and then scratch at the door to be let back out. It's the sort of cat I feel I deserve to have in my life. Aloof. A user. Generally thankless.

I don't live in Preventer housing like I did last time I worked in Brussels. My apartment is half of a massive, converted house in a quiet and expensive neighborhood, purposefully too expensive for the salaries of all of my subordinates. In the spring, the ivy creeps up the building. I like that.

But I miss my home in Sanc, for the land, the solitude, the garden. I still own it, but it's now more often than not inhabited by Soren and the boyfriend whose name I choose not to remember because Soren's too good for him. A bad habit he's picked up. I let him have my bike after I laid it down on a back road and broke my left arm and clavicle. It was the closest thing to a miracle I'll let myself bite into, because I must have been going at least 80 kph. Without a helmet. I sagely considered it a sign to grow up and put the last of my fast toys away.

Fortunately, four or five ecstatic times a year, I get to suit up and crush my guts in the Tallgeese for a few days of fake-fire training. It had to be something, if not my bike. Maybe skydiving. Hopefully not gambling or shoplifting or anything so destructive. I do believe that I've put many things behind me, but I don't doubt that there might still darkness there, untapped, waiting for a catalyst. I don't hope for it, but I won't blind myself to the possibility.

I yank off my tie and hang it on the rack in my closet. Jesus. My closet is a novella about how far I've stooped. I don't wear a uniform, because I'm not, nor ever will be, considered an agent. That was part of my return agreement. I'm not going to go gallivanting around the ESUN solving crimes, unveiling dastardly plots, or tracking suspicious cargo shipments. You want me back, here are the rules: no secret agent bullshit, quarterly weapons/MS/flight qualification at Gobi Proving Grounds, assignment as primary pilot of Tallgeese, and departmental control over the anti-MS project, because if you want me to be in charge of something, at least make it something interesting and direly useful. And now I have a closet full of button-down shirts, khakis, and a whole goddamn rack full of ties. Thank God my sister developed decent taste somewhere in her maturation process.

It's late. I heat up a leftover veal cutlet, sit on the kitchen counter to eat it, and look at my fridge at the one picture I brought with me from Sanc. Most days I don't even think about him, which is sad. Not pitiful sad, but the kind of sad that makes me choke. The fact that I don't think about him is more upsetting to me sometimes than his actual absence. There's nothing deliberate about it, but somehow life ended up being more important than grieving. Even if I don't have anyone to come home to. Even if my friends are few and far away. Somehow, I moved on. And that bothers me, when I get like this. When the calendar gets like this.

Later still, on the far edge of my queen-sized bed, I fall asleep to the tiny sound of wet snow hitting my window.

xxxx

I could hear him moving around behind me, suddenly there when he shouldn't be, back from building a fire in his room, which he must have done at world record speed. It was freezing outside, a typical Russian December except that we were stationed temporarily in Egypt at the time, spoiled by the opposite extreme of desert heat. He started humming a Christmas song – Cantique de Noel, for some reason – and I heard the slide of hard cover as he pulled and replaced several books from the case in the corner.

I hunched over the small writing table, the pressure making me sweat under the arms, because it was hard enough trying to think of what to write when he was upstairs. Stupid, stupid. What insanity possessed me so completely that this actually sounded like a good idea at one point?

Treize, I'm... I'm...I'm... glad? I supposed that was the word. Treize, I'm glad...

"What are you writing?"

I rushed to cover my work, but with nowhere to slide it – stupid, I should have brought a magazine to shove it in – I had to manage with my not-big-enough hand. I turned, poorly willing my face to neutrality.

"Nothing."

Worst answer. Absolutely worst answer I could possibly have offered. His red head tilted, eyes alight with interest that, until my lame explanation, was only perfunctory. He took a pair of steps closer, smiling slyly, focus darting over my shoulder to the damning piece of folded card stock I was pathetically shifting to keep from view. A flash of white teeth and he lunged for it, fast as his adolescent test scores promised, now companioned by a twenty-three-year-old's strength and the fat-egoed determination of the most powerful man in the Federation, the Specials, and OZ.

He grabbed it, just barely, and as I saw him open it, I rose, intentionally towering, and made my own too-slow reach. He bolted off with it, fast as the devil, and, of course, I pursued. Out of the study, through the hall, narrowly avoiding the brutal sideswiping of one of Lara's kitchen girls, who squawked and yelled something irreverent about maturity. The groan-thwack of the back door and he was out, into the blackness of the night, boots crunching a fast rhythm in the snow. I gained hard as a second wind of adrenaline pushed me forward, with nothing but the thought of roughly subduing him on my mind. The surge, the violence of hunting him. My long legs matched, and with a small growl I snagged his arm, whipped him around with a thrown-out foot, and pinned him flat on his back.

I sat on his stomach, panting, hands pressed down hard on his shoulders. And he was laughing, so hard that he didn't even make a sound except for loud, gasping inhales, his arms stretched out at his sides, my Christmas card to him saved from the snow by the curled fist that held it.

"...Get off..." he managed, face a dimpled and uninhibited expression of hilarity that I'd never seen before. Certainly never in childhood. Definitely never in adulthood.

I didn't lift my hand to snatch it back, because I knew the second I lifted it, it'd be me pinned instead of him, hysterical laughter or no. He pushed against me, tried to wriggle me off balance.

"Oh God... it's cold... " He struggled some more. "Get off... it's melting..."

It was melting. My knees and shins were slowly soaking, a sopping, sticky, nasty, freeze-the-bones sort of cold.

"I think you were the one who wanted to come outside."

"...It's cold...cold..." The laughter was dying down, but he was still grinning widely, even though his brows were pinched together in obvious discomfort. In the light from the house, his face was hot red against the snow. Someone started yelling, the mole-faced housekeeper, cawing in sloshy, toothless Russian that we were going to freeze to death, idiot-boys, that we didn't even bring our coats.

"What you took was my business, not yours," I told him. "You can't just take my things."

"It was for me... I saw my name in it."

"After you took it."

I was calm. Resoundingly, abnormally so. I pressed my weight harder into him, and his free hand latched onto my leg.

"Please... let's go inside." His hand loosened, rested on my thigh, and he continued to smile coaxingly. "You're heavy."

"All I've been waiting for is an apology."

"I said 'please.'"

"'Please' is not an apology. It's a bequest. It's begging. I thought you'd sooner say sorry than beg."

"I did not realize this was a character examination."

I pressed myself off of him then, found my numbing feet below me. I unthinkingly offered him my hand. Thinkingly, I didn't let it go, so we stood there, hands clasped in a wet shake, me, somehow also smiling, impossibly free of anger, not even mildly irritated.

"It's Christmas," I said.

"Yes," he breathed in a plume of condensation. His shoulders were wrenched up, his free arm stiffly arranged close at his side. He then turned and pulled me behind him as he walked back towards the house, my card still tight in his grasp. We never held hands. My head swam joyfully.

He let go on the stairway and I followed him up, watching his fantastic ass in his expensive jeans as he took them by twos. His clothes were completely soaked through, the hair on the back of his head a wet shade of brown. He stripped off his wool jumper as soon as he hit the doorway of his room, and I kicked the door shut behind me as he peeled off his white undershirt. He undressed faster than I've ever seen and buried himself deep under the covers before I even had my socks off.

"Ah, this feels so good..." he mumbled into the thick down of the winter duvet.

I crawled in after him, naked as he was, and I hissed when his icicle hand grabbed at my waist and pulled me in close. His cold, smooth chin rested on my shoulder, and we lay there silently as we warmed, the fire he built earlier crackling loudly in the hearth.

A few long, contented minutes later, he moved his hands, and my Christmas card swam up from beneath the bedding. I could imagine the sight, two grown men huddled in a bank of white, nothing but their heads and a crinkled piece of painted paper to show the rest of the world...

On the front were trees, coniferous, snow-covered Siberian trees, I supposed, and in the background was a horse-drawn sleigh with a pair of vague people in it. There were no words on the front, no season's greeting.

He looked at it, intently, like a connoisseur's admiration of fine art.

"I like this," he told me. "This reminds me of home." He paused. "Of us. That could be us."

"That's why I picked it," I replied softly. "I thought of you when I saw it."

He was so desperate to keep the covers close that he scraped the card's edge along his face trying to open it. The inside was blank except for my tight, meticulous handwriting, which read:

Treize, I'm glad

"Obviously I didn't get to finish," I said.

He smiled. A good one. A great one. Perfect. That was Treize. That would always be Treize to me. That one smile.

"I think it's wonderful." He turned his head and touched his lips to my cheek. "I'm still not sorry."

I laughed quietly. "I might call the doctor if you were..."

xxxx

And that was basically it. Our last Christmas as friends, pieced together in the haze of 0400 half-sleep. My recollections are much weaker now, skeletal where detail was once fresh and alive, a force I was pathologically dedicated to preserving in the thousands and thousands of pages of writing I produced in the aftermath of Treize's death. It was a manic and exhausting purgation, driven by a heart-pausing fear that I would forget something – anything – about him and the years I had with him. I don't do that anymore. I spun out soon after I met Soren, put it on hold, as I termed it, though I never did return to the process that was surprisingly soul-sucking.

My phone rings, a rattlingly loud vibration against my nightstand. Nobody should ever be calling this early, especially not on a day when we already have to stay overtime for mandatory fun and recognition. I roll to my side, bangs falling into my face, and slam my hand down on my cell harder than I intended. I rest it against my ear with proportional gentleness.

"Merquise."

I listen, and as I hang up, I'm left with the distinct impression that the universe does have a very conscious sense of humor. I've been selected for a Merry Christmas urinalysis, which means I get to crawl into work three hours early and have some equally as fortune-challenged agent watch me piss in a cup. There is a certain level of amusement to it, mostly because nobody wants to watch Milliardo Peacecraft piss in a cup. I could be woken for worse things – disasters, attempts on my sister's life, terrorist attacks. And then I remember again after a sleepy, magical moment of forgetfulness that the Christmas party is tonight, which puts this urinalysis on temporary par with a blown-up office. I groan, toss my phone to the foot of the bed, and bury my head in the covers for just a few minutes more.

I wish he were here. I wish it was him on the other side of the bed instead of cold nothing. He would laugh right about now, press his chest against my back, arm firmly around me, and tell me that there are greater indignities in the world than showing my dick to a stranger. Like what? Well, like showing it to someone you know.

I miss him, today as much as I ever have. And as I've learned to do, I leave it at just that.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

The cafeteria is an unbecoming place to have a Christmas party, that much was grumbled about when the notice fliers went out last week. But I'm beginning to see a whisper of sense in it now. I'm in the farthest corner of the room, tucked as far away as possible from the stage as I can humanly be without dissolving into the back wall. Really, what sort of proper cafeteria has a convertible stage if not one intended for this exact purpose? People expected it to be classier, a hotel ballroom or banquet hall. People expected a dress code. With my tie crammed in my pocket and my top buttons yanked open, I'm not even living up to expectations for the work day.

I'm folded in a two-person booth, two barely-bum-narrow benches separated by a table constructed to accommodate two plastic trays and little else. I've calculated the cost of being so far back, namely that I'll have to pass by every agent and their date/child/mother/whatever to get to my award for the prodigious achievement of doing what they pay me to do. I'm also beginning to calculate the cost of choosing this particular booth, because the room is filling fast, and my size makes this a queasily intimate seating arrangement. I was thinking that it would be left free, and now I'm fiercely hoping for it as the procession of horrible potential seating companions begins to trickle in.

I slouch as much as my legs will let me, which is not nearly deeply enough for when Noin – who, according to all sources, is supposed to be on Mars – walks in. The thought of being stuck in a booth with her – the thought of even making eye contact with her – makes me grit my teeth and develop an instantaneous fascination with the trivia game Soren put on my phone last time I visited him. I keep an inconspicuous eye on her through the fringe of my hair as she searches the room to the point of creating a foot traffic back flow into the hall. She settles distractedly for a spot near the front, one of the two at Sally's table that have coats thrown over them. She sits, still searching, though less obviously now.

How long does one nanosecond last?

The more pertinent question might be: How many nanoseconds am I going to have to sit here before they dim the lights and get this spectacle moving?

I don't slouch when Chang strides in, sure as if he'd been born for this one event, and nimbly weaves his way through patches of chatters to the distinguished table where Noin and Sally are. The second coat is removed, and he settles into his reserved seat with acrobatic lightness. I don't feel anything when I see him, not anymore, except for a grudging acknowledgment of his moody contributions to the organization. But that doesn't mean I want to share a table with him. And now I don't have to. Good.

Une is staged at the front, at a table stuffed with suits. Two senators, both powerful defense advocates, the same man and woman monetarily responsible for the scientific history my department's going to make in the next year. Some guy from from the president's cabinet, Velasquez, I think. Une looks small among them, a tiny buoy in a sea of boisterousness. Next to her is an empty seat. She, like many others, scans the room when she can break conversation long enough. She does not look happy.

The lights flash, like in the theater during intermission. Agent Chu, local smartass who missed his calling anywhere else but here, yaps cutely into the mike on stage that we have five minutes to be seated, or else the director's going to start rethinking some of these awards up here. Gesture to stack on adjacent table. Riotous. Somebody two tables over scoffs, my most talented engineer, Predragović. The men around her, 'my boys,' nod and laugh, making sure she knows that they agree. She does as well as she can for being the only woman in the department.

The way Maxwell moseys in is almost morose, if one could even describe a mosey suchly. He's the tail-end of the late crowd of agents that view every precious lingering moment as one less spent in a crammed, hot cafeteria with everyone they never wanted to share this little breathing space with. His hands are shoved in the pockets of his jacket, face an unmitigated mask of disinterest. One man I honestly wouldn't mind having at my table, except that he comes as a generally inextricable two-for-one bargain with Heero Yuy, a deal-breaker even if the table were big enough for both of them. Yuy sees me, stares as steadily as I do until Maxwell catches him and tosses me a nod as he breaks us up with a tug on Yuy's elbow. With some slinking effort, they wedge into their own corner at the other side of the room.

The lights go. Finally. I heave a quiet sigh of relief for the preservation of my personal space. In the dark, nobody cares who's sitting where, and the few straining for sight of straggling friends are drawn by the shrill grate of Chu's opening set. He's either impervious to or dedicatedly working against the fact that the crowd is already squirming, having spent the better part of two weeks working the event up in their minds as the most atrocious waste of government money ever concocted. I'm not even certain that the promise of an open bar and catered dinner will be able to keep the room focused for the next hour.

Something about the last training exercise. Who could forget Lowe, the rookie, fresh from the academy, firing that grenade launcher perfectly on his first try? Wow. And then Spiegel, putting his boot on the neck of his former instructor, who was playing the opposing force – oh! what we wouldn't all give to put a boot on the neck of all of our instructors, eh? Ha.

If anyone ever tried to put a boot on my neck, they would have no foot left to put a boot on. I believe that's one reason they never asked me to be an instructor.

The crowd does seem to be warming in remembrance, remarkably, so I don't feel quite as rude when I stop paying attention to him and go back to my game.

How many equal sides does an icosahedron have?

How many days can an ant survive under water?

Who developed the Gaia Theory?

A small, dull thump shakes the table. When I look up, someone is sitting on the other side of my booth, perched on the edge, facing out, obscured by a long, black, hood-drawn coat. The person, a female from the slightness of stature, looks slowly over the crowd. I stare, not specifically perturbed, not yet, but I assume visibly off-put as is my default. She then turns, faces me.

"You don't mind if I sit here, do you?"

I had a dream about this once. I'm reluctant to call it a nightmare, but it was far from the most pleasant sleep I've had. It was like this, except in a confessional booth. I think she was even wearing a hood then, too.

She looks... so much like him.

An appropriately female version, a well-proportioned face accented in many of those hard to pinpoint ways that his uniquely was. She doesn't have his nose, nor his brows, which is likely fortunate for her. But even though they're not the same shade of blue, not like the dark power of the Pacific, she absolutely has his eyes. The way he looked at the world, at people, subtle tones of bemusement by turns advertising and masking his innate curiosity. She's looking at me in that exact way. Even with her face half-shadowed in the dimness, I would never misplace that look.

"I should be sitting up there," she tells me with the light jerk of her head towards the empty seat at Une's side, "but I got distracted on my way to the bathroom. Did you know they have cake out there?" Her head tilts back towards the cafeteria entrance.

Some distraction. The ceremony began twenty minutes ago.

It takes a real concentration of will and effort to unlock my jaw to respond. "There's a party after."

"A reward for the suffering?"

She no longer has a child's voice. The last time I heard her, she was seven, and she was threatening to destroy us, the Earth, unless we all bowed down to her. Kinder than I was, because I never gave anyone any kind of option before raining down a thousand-times Tunguska on Siberia. She's a young woman now, just about as old as I was when she was born.

God, I hate that I didn't know about her. I don't think I've come close to forgiving him for that.

"I suppose."

She watches Chu, I watch her. She sniggers at one of his jokes in a way that conveys both sarcasm and a certain genuine joy that people like him exist in this world. She swivels on her rear, cants herself in towards me, then plants her left elbow on the table and props her pale chin in her small, thin hand.

"Would you rather be alone?" she asks me seriously.

She gets shushed by someone at the next table, which she ignores completely. I, however, do not ignore it, rotating at the waist until I catch sight of the irritable prick who would shush anybody during this misery. It's one of my engineers, and he appears promptly regretful.

I turn back to her. She's on her feet, right next to me, diminutive even in a heavy quilted coat.

"I'm going to step out," she says. "To the lobby."

Then she walks off, and her purple printed rain boots squeak on the linoleum as she makes her casual exit. She doesn't even attempt to mute the loud clack and moan of the door as she shoves it open and lets it slam. People turn to look, but like a little black phantom, she's gone.

I sit, half-stunned, like I've just left the scene of a terrible accident. My mouth is dry, maybe because it's hanging open a little bit, sucking in thick air. Chu says something that makes some people break out in whoops and claps, which I register as acutely annoying and alienating to the point of inflicting on me a claustrophobic smothering sensation, one I feel urgently compelled to move away from. I eye the door, which is past five tables of forward-facing agents, each wearing a smile of varying degrees from flat-ish to clown-ish. I grip the side of the table, and as another surge of applause erupts in a lazy wave from the front, I'm up and following her.

I stop outside the door, look to the right, then the left. She's where she said she'd be, in the immense lobby, which is decked out in holiday colors and spicy-sweet with the smells of what's heating at the buffet. She's standing at the dessert table, hood now off, chatting animatedly. As I approach, I hear her trying out some French on the goateed young man plating some sort of galette.

When she sees me, she smiles. Her teeth are a couple shallow angles shy of perfect, just like his were before he decided to be like everyone else, uniqueness trumped predictably by his untamed vanity. I get the sense from the green knee-high socks that peek over the tops of her rubber boots that she's not the type to have them straightened.

"I was telling Henri about the pastry shop we had on the colony, how I thought it was so good until I came here and had real pastry."

She tells me this in French, colored like her Standard with her Triple-Nine accent, which comes off to me as more South African than anything I've heard out of any other natively English-speaking country. It's unmistakably colonial, and I wonder if that's something she holds proudly, even as she's barred by her guardian from going back to where she was born.

"What do you like?" she asks me, still in French, pointing at the spread that kind-faced Henri is opening his hands to in a gesture of presentation. I wonder what he's thinking, having Mariemaia Khushrenada and Milliardo Peacecraft – two of the most menacing threats the world has seen in this era – inspecting his food when we're both supposed to be dozing our mundane lives away in the next room.

"I'm fine," I dismiss.

Her mouth quirks in what might be disappointment as she picks out a chocolate mousse with a gracious 'merci.' She leads me without asking to a two-person table pushed up next to the enormous floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the green campus lawn. It's already dark, though the unnatural glow of the city makes it less-so.

Funny, I don't get to this end of the building often. That drive outside, the one that leads to the front entrance, is the same where Vadimas dropped me six Christmases ago. I remember it vividly. I remember him vividly...

"We could easily be assassinated here," she observes correctly as she pokes her spoon into her mousse. "Bam-bam, somebody feels better about themselves. Temporarily, at least."

Who would want to kill Mariemaia? Plenty of people, mostly sympathy-deficient types who feel she, as a heavily brainwashed child of grammar school age, got off too easily for the havoc she perpetrated, during which, by the by, only a few people were killed. All on her side. Probably some by Yuy and crew, probably a couple by Noin and me, even though we exercised great restraint. It's part of the same crowd who'd love to put a bullet in my head, even after so many years, though I'm not arguing that the justification has expired. She's right. This would be an opportune moment. In fact, she's too right.

I rest fully back in my chair and search out past the perimeter. "They could stage in that tree," I say, "the one outside the gate. There's plenty of coverage. Using a P-50B with a P-023 telescopic sight, a talented marksman could get two fifty-caliber rounds off before we had time to react."

"We're morbid." This seems to privately amuse her. She puts half-spoonful of dessert in her mouth, upside down, and slowly pulls it out. "Anne's going to be upset that I'm not sitting with her."

"Probably."

"She talks about me when she's with you, doesn't she?"

"I still haven't determined why."

"She takes everything personally."

I watch her then slowly carve out a circle in her mousse, fingers surgically maneuvering the utensil like an Exacto knife. Distraction seems to be affecting the precision of the operation, and there's a tiny tremor rattling her outstretched pinky. Her short nails are painted a dark color that's chipped differently by finger.

"Do you see how she might?" I ask after some length.

"It's not her." I don't completely believe this, for no other reason than the way her voice is oddly trampled here and nowhere else. "She's fine. She's my legal guardian and the executor of my finances, which doesn't mean a terrific lot because all she did was hire a lawyer that I end up talking to most of the time. It's only until I file for emancipation, though that will unfortunately have to wait until I'm sixteen."

Sad, is the word that comes immediately to mind. Sad, the way she folds up, visibly draws back, body language wary. She puts down her spoon and swings her legs out for the ruse of pulling up her slouching socks over her black tights. Her coat is so long that I can't tell what else she's wearing. As Une complained, her adoption of New York fashion suggests an infinite number of possibilities.

"I don't have a great deal of trust," she tells me plainly, "especially in adults who tell me they're doing what's best for me. It's not personal, not when it comes to her or anyone else. I simply learned my lesson."

Her hair is a red shock, cropped short, probably dyed, and banking barely on the feminine side of androgynous. It hangs in the air as she bends over her own skinny legs.

"Like my grandfather," she continues, ""who told me for years that my father thought I was dead, that it was important for him to think that, but only for a little while longer. It was always 'only for a little while longer.'"

It is indescribably surreal to hear her refer to Treize as 'my father.' I can't envision him with paternal responsibility, though he was consummately responsible when it came to most other things. Fatherhood is an institution, a club, a trap that repelled people specifically like him. Wasn't that one of the best things he had going for him, his blissfully liberating lack of attachment to wife or child? And now here's Mariemaia, his daughter, calling him that, and here I'm put to the challenge of internalizing something I can barely accept.

She sits up then, and the look she gives me, hawkish, resonates unsettlingly as a look I've seen before. I can't determine if it's from her past or Treize's.

"Did he think I was dead?"

She's the black hole in Treize's life that burned a slow ulcer of loathing in my gut when he came back from L3 – loathing, because I don't know how else to describe the bitter helplessness, the anger I felt for being barred from knowing, like an unscrupulous stranger. She was the something that wasn't right about him, when he told me he was fine and expected me docilely consume whatever tripe he shoveled at me. Did he think his daughter was dead? Certainly if he thought she was alive, she never would have become the monster that Dekim made her. I at least have some faith in that. He would have done something.

"Why are you asking me?"

She crosses her legs and cups her hands over her kneecap. "In my experience, almost every rumor is mostly true. Like when you hear that your five best engineers are planning to turn against you and steal your best weapons. Like when you hear that some lunatic is going to drop a colony on Earth and call it Operation Something. Like when you hear that your father was in love with his best friend, a prince from a broken dream."

I can't honestly say that the comment surprises me, which is why I don't fully understand the heated rush of embarrassment I feel in my face. "I never even knew you existed."

"I waited for him, you know." She looks down, past her boot, expression taxed in her remembrance. "I wanted him to come get me, for even though I was young and a stupid child, I knew something wasn't right. I wanted to see him again, because I remember him, distantly. I have an excellent memory. My grandfather told me he visited me and that I came to Earth to visit him, before my mother died." She frowns. "That I don't remember. I don't ever remember being on Earth until 196. And I barely remember that time."

Her thin lips then reverse to become a modest smile. "My therapist calls it 'selective repression,' but I'm fairly sure that's a made-up term."

"Why do you still see her?"

"Because he's cute. He went to Harvard. Not tremendously bright, though. Smart, but not bright."

She folds her arms over her stomach and leans slightly over them. Her face in thought is dark, a notable contrast to Treize, who never looked half as menacing as some of the plans he made. I don't try to fill the silence, which is not true silence because I can hear a female voice indistinctly from the cafeteria. Probably that senator, the former Federation colonel safely on maternity leave when Treize tricked Yuy into killing everyone who might have saved us all.

"I feel like I don't know him," she finally says. "Anne's not helpful. What I've learned from her I could have read off of a cereal box."

I eye her unemotionally. "So you want to ask me."

"Yes." Just like in the booth, she swings her legs back in and faces me again, shoe resting on mine for a second until she registers that it's me and not the table leg. "I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, but you've been evasive."

"Maybe I don't want to talk to you," I shoot back less-than-cordially, mostly serious, only partially motivated by curiosity over her reaction.

"Then why _are_ you talking to me? Why aren't you in there, nodding off to the Chu-Chu happy fun time hour?"

She pushes her picked-at mousse to the side and clasps her hands together in the middle of the table, forearms like two arrows converged at a single point, aimed right for my xiphoid process.

"Maybe," she continues, "because we're looking for a little of the same thing."

I didn't come into this conversation completely blind, despite how unplanned it was. There are certain things about Mariemaia Khushrenada that everybody knows, namely that she's enviably intelligent. Actually, now that I'm trying to formulate a list, that may be the only fact most have on her. Some still don't believe she's Treize's, though, as something of a subject matter expert, I know she undoubtedly is. A few know, as I began to unwillingly come to know through Une, that she's unrepentantly independent.

But I wonder how many people know how cunning she is, spinning the right word with the right intonation at the perfect moment to deliver the precise effect, to affect precisely. It is a rare talent that few in positions that require it possess. I see potentiality in it. Someone's worst nightmare.

"What year are you in school?" I ask.

She draws her hands back, and I can practically see her mind recalculating. "I'm graduating next year. I'm planning to go to New York University, at least until I can go back home."

"What do you want to study?"

"Maths and probably anthropology," she tells me quickly. "Listen, I get it, Zechs. I never thought talking to you would be a polly picnic, but I've got a little more tenacity than you might expect."

"He thought calculus was fun."

There's a brilliant light in her eyes reflecting that first glimmer of real information about Treize. Her head jerks a bit to the side as she kicks through the shock. "...It is. How far did he get?"

"The Lake Victoria curriculum stopped at differential equations," I say as I think back, "but I once caught him with a couple of books on complex and real analysis"

During leave. What kind of man reads math books for fun?

"Did you love him?"

I purse my lips. For as invading, ill-timed, and inappropriately personal as it is, I am also unforeseeably moved by the desperation in the question. She's likely planning to never see me again, to be foiled for the remainder of her life by my, what did she call it? Evasiveness. If she's really been trying so hard to talk to me, it's not unrealistic that she told Une she wasn't coming to the ceremony just so I'd think I was in the clear – which I did.

I sense at this point that I'm going to fold. I'm already folding, just looking at her face. Like I once did, she's latching on to every fraying thread of him she can get her hands on, except, unlike me, she only had the barest piece to begin with.

"I didn't choose to live in New York because I'm closed-minded," she adds pressingly. "My flat is in Chelsea."

"I don't even know what that means."

She starts mindlessly picking away the nail polish on her right middle finger. "It doesn't really matter, I suppose."

"Why are you asking me this?"

"It's important to me."

I can feel myself scowl. I want a better answer. I want her honesty, the deepest honesty she'll give, and I'm willing to relentlessly test every layer of ground she stands upon to discover it. I want her to give what Treize too often refused me: the terrible privilege of truth.

"Why?" I repeat.

Her eyes close, chin ducking into her purple-green checkered scarf, just for a second, and then she's there again, that young woman, years ahead and still so many behind.

"'How can we know a man until we discover what his heart longs for?'"

Bajek. She knows Bajek, my favorite author in history, enough to quote him. I'm not much for conversationally inserted quotations, because I generally find them pretentious and showy, but Bajek is my single selfish exception. Because Bajek knew love. He was a romantic, and he knew us all, I think. Even me. Even Treize. Even her.

Her mouth works for a mute moment before she rasps out thickly, "Does your heart long for him?"

There are so many ridiculous ways that could have come out, but the way she says it, the quiet intensity, the shattering sincerity, it almost hurts. I didn't expect her sensitivity. For a child so horribly, abusively wronged, I didn't expect this at all from her...

"Yes," I say flatly.

"And did he love you back?"

He told me he did, to remember it always. No matter how many barbs or bullets we traded, no matter if he died, no matter how many years I would have to be alone without him. No matter if I live to be eighty and can't even remember the sound of his voice... I know he did.

"Yes."

She looks out the window, and her mouth twitches indecisively between a frown and a smile.

I speak slowly, hindered by the churning of thoughts and old memories. "You said he was told you were dead. When do you think that might have happened?"

"My grandfather said..." she begins gently, "...I believe it was when my mother died. Eleven years ago." She rotates her wrist and glances down at it. "Yesterday."

I get it now, back then. That day. Like a landslide. In the unexpected sense I make of it, I feel slapped numb.

"That day," I tell her, "eleven years ago, Treize shut down his entire division. Do you know how large a division is?"

She shakes her head, looking back out into the city.

"About 10,000 soldiers. He locked himself inside his office. I tried to call him all day, and when he didn't answer, I hacked his key pad and let myself in. He wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I was very angry about that."

So angry, and I can't believe I still feel it. Furious, even after all this time.

"He was a mess. He didn't go back to work for three days, which is a standing record for him for personal time. I stayed with him, on his couch, because I was so worried."

I would catch him with his hand over his face when he thought I wasn't looking. I looked so often then, not only because I was worried, but also because I was in love with him. Had been, however unclearly, for as long as I could remember. One form or another, I always loved him. Seeing him like that, thinking that I couldn't help him, because I had no idea... I was so worried.

I watch her closely, sharply attentive to every physical nuance that my words evoke in her. Watching her is like watching him, sometimes like watching mercury dance, or sometimes like witnessing a slow death, each second final, extinct, meaningful beyond its immediate context. Locked, captured by her, I continue.

"I think the fact that he let me stay was the most troubling part of all. He never did tell me why."

Her chin is twitching, and she folds in her arms tight against herself. Her sky blue eyes track up and over, as far away from me as they can get without the turn of her head.

I feel cold as I say it, even though it's something beautifully tender, something profoundly telling of the person he was. Saying it, I once again feel the horror of his impossible loss.

"He must have loved you very much."

Adding to this evening's tally of bewilderments, I never thought I would see her cry. I realize now that I know nothing about her. Nothing, no matter how familiar she seems, no matter how much Une's told me. I can't even imagine what it's been like to beg to hear a single substantial thing about the man she waited a small lifetime to see again, only to be abandoned by him in the most irreversible way possible.

I have to sniff back my running nose.

I flinch when Mari suddenly lets out a half-sobbed laugh. "I think they just called your name."

I look towards the cafeteria. Lamentably, my hearing's not as sharp after years of combat and drills and shop work, but I hear it repeated, muffled through the thin wall, seeping out from under the double doors.

"Oops."

"Now we're really going to be in trouble." She laughs again, shakily, as she brushes her fingers across her cheeks. "Should we go back in, now that I'm a complete wreck?"

"It wouldn't be worth it," I assure, pulling a napkin from the dispenser on my side of the table and handing it to her. "Mine was supposed to be the last presented."

"Must have been an important award."

I snort. "They only wanted to make sure I stayed until the end."

We hear Chu finish rambling, a last, tired round of applause, and then the din of hundreds of impatient and hungry government employees as they stand and scooch and gather and probably trade witticisms about how it was the longest ceremony they've ever been to. And the older ones are probably shaking their heads and saying 'You don't know anything about long unless you've been to a Federation change-of-command function.'

Mari fidgets to put herself back together before the predictable inquisition and barrage of incredulous looks. She smooths her hair, wipes at scant traces of running eye makeup, and wads her napkin in the pocket of her coat.

"Are you ready for this?" she asks.

"I'm used to being stared at by everyone and scolded by Une. It's a typical occurrence. But I'm not going to stick around for it." I push out my chair and stand. "How long will you be in town?"

"Through Christmas, but I'm not sure how much longer." She stiffens, and her hand rises fast and grasps onto my forearm. "Wait, you're leaving right now?"

Looking down at where she's snagged me, I nod, then have a brief flash of panic over the coat I accidentally left in the cafeteria. But fuck it. There's no way I'm going back in there. I take a deep breath and finish what I was starting to say.

"My sister gets quite taken with the holiday," I understate, "and we do a Christmas thing every year."

I imagine the 'Christmas things' we've had in the past, charming visions of me passed out on the stairs, on the couch in her den, on the bathroom floor. I'm pleased to declare that I've graduated from that humiliating phase, but without the entertainment factors of alcohol and uncontrollable emotional outbursts, I find the season's festivities substantially less intense. And by that, I mean that they're dreadfully boring.

"You and Anne should join us, if you can get her to take the time off. I don't think she's planning on going back to Germany. And you're welcome even if she tries to make some excuse about the other side of the city being too far." I glance over to where the first of the crowd is filtering into the lobby, then turn quickly back to Mariemaia. "Show up, stay a couple of days. I promise it will, at least, be interesting." I slide my uncaptured hand in my pocket and rub the silk of my discarded tie between my fingers. "And I'll tell you more about him."

Now that's a smile I know.

For a second, right before she lets go, her grip goes deceptively tight for her size. "Just don't forget to save some things for yourself," she reminds me.

I smile back. I feel deliriously calm in the knowledge that this is the right thing, the thing that's been missing. It's what she deserves and, I think, what Treize finally deserves, too.

"It's been a few years since I've seen your sister," she says with dramatically fabricated whimsy. "About six, actually. I recall having a blast."

Dark. Very dark. "If that's supposed to be a joke, it's not funny."

"It was a joke. And it was terribly funny."

Truthfully, it kind of was.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

I hit the parking structure just before Yuy and Maxwell. I blow past them in my chicly relevant electric car, and I even wave, just a small lift of the hand from the top of the steering wheel, like people do in the country. They look sufficiently, pleasingly confused. I get Ethiopian take-away and eat it while watching the cat scoot and wriggle across the floor, leaving an orange fur streak in its wake.

Then I put on sweats and a t-shirt and stand, hands on my hips, at the juncture of the kitchen and my living room. I honestly do have formed tastes in art and decoration, but my apartment is contradictorily a marvel of spartan functionality. I have no decorations. I have no tree. I should get a tree, even though Christmas if in four days. But then, I don't think that's enough time. Next year, though.

I remember something, and in an instant, I have a crystal clean image in my head of exactly where it is. Thinking of that, I haven't seen Dorothy in at least a year. I don't think I ever thanked her for the things she saved for me from Treize's house. I should go around and make amends, like a reformed addict who's left a long and sad trail of hurt on the road to recovery. That is essentially what I am, isn't it? I heard she's in law school now, and I predict a grand ascent for her in the near future. She was born for it, just like my sister was. At least there will be someone in the ESUN to keep Relena perpetually on her toes. Complain as she might, I think she secretly likes it.

Under my bed. Shoe box. Ridiculous. I'm not certain if it was mixed in with my things or if she purposefully made sure I got it. Neither would surprise me, because I do have a small capacity for sentimentality, and because I think Dorothy was well aware of how things were with us. I take it out to the living room and set it up on the mantle above the empty fire place I'm not allowed to use because of new city air pollution laws.

A green, snow-dusted forest. A sleigh for two.

I take a few steps to the right, because it's crumpled and it's starting to seem a bit crooked from this angle...

My breath stops for a half-blind second, and my hand is fumbling and unfeeling as I take the card and open it wide. Something I hadn't noticed... how could I not have noticed this? I suppose because I never bothered opening it again...

At the bottom, below the 'Treize, I'm glad' that took me fifteen minutes to scrawl, is his handwriting:

'So am I. Love, Treize.'

I cough lightly against the clenching tightness in my throat. Stupidly, I have a flash of insane hope that maybe after all these years he isn't really dead, that he broke into my apartment while I was at the Christmas party, found my secret shoe box stash, and scribbled a note in this eight-year-old card on the blue moon off-chance that I'd get nostalgic for Russia, for him, and decide to decorate my empty mantle with it.

"I met your daughter today," I say as if he were standing behind me, as if insanity were truth. "Love is a given with children, but I think you'd really like her, too. I wish you would have told me, in your own words, because then maybe I wouldn't have been so afraid of her."

I look over my shoulder, just in case. Of course, he's not there.

My phone vibrates once, informing me of a message. Card still in hand, his words still scraping over old wounds, I walk to the coffee table, pick it up, and read.

'Got your coat! Give it to you at R's. Thanks for tonight. -M'

I'm smirking now, with a strange endearment for someone who's neither my relative nor my friend. His daughter, the last living part of him, someone who draws me in as much as she painfully reminds of the vacuum he left in me. There's something mystical in this, something I shouldn't believe in because I'm a grown man and not a very fanciful one at that. She seems almost an impossible occurrence, an impossible end to such a twisted story. Light from secrets and lies and manipulation. Another thread, just when I thought I was done reaching for them.

Whatever she is to me, and whatever she will be, she's in my life now. Irreversibly.

And I'm glad.


End file.
